REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
TO THE JEWISH COMMUNITY CELEBRATION
Sony Picture Studios
Los Angeles, California

6:20 P.M. PDT

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. Let me begin by thanking Tim
and Joel Tauber (phonetic) and Tod Morgan and Bill Dotcher (phonetic)
and all the leaders of the organizations that brought you all here
together. Thank you for giving Hillary such a good reception, I am
grateful for that.

I want to say, more than anything else, how profoundly grateful I
am for the support I have received from the American Jewish community
since 1991, when I first began running for President. (Applause.)

When Hillary and I were discussing whether I should make this race,
way back in '91, well over eight years ago now, one of the things that I
hoped I could do was to bring whatever powers of persuasion and
understanding of history, as well as human psychology that I've acquired
over the years, to the process of peace in the world.

It seemed to me that the end of the Cold War had imposed upon the
United States a very special responsibility to reach out and build
bridges to countries and regions that we had too often overlooked or
seen through a limited lens during the period of the Cold War; and to
try to be a special force for peace, from the Northern Ireland problem
to the Balkans to Haiti and our own region, but especially in the Middle
East.

And for nearly eight years now, we have worked to be faithful to
the commitment I made to the American people when I began, that we would
make the United States the world's leader for peace and freedom, for
human rights and security wherever we possibly could. (Applause.) This
has been the most rewarding thing, I think, in many ways I've been able
to do as President. But it's a work that is -- and by the very nature
of the way we human beings are -- it's a work that will always be, to
some extent, in progress.

Hillary has done a lot, especially with her Vital Voices program in
Northern Ireland, going to Israel and working with Mrs. Barak on the
violence issue. And, before that, working with others who were in the
Israeli government.

I think I should tell you that the last person I talked to before
my plane landed in Los Angeles was Leah Rabin. (Applause.) She's back
here in the United States seeing her doctor, she said she got a
reasonably good report. And I told her I was going to see you and she
asked me to say hello, so I'm doing it. And I want to get my brownie
points with her for doing it. (Applause.)

Tim already mentioned the nomination of Joe Lieberman, but I want
to say just a few words about it. I was at a dinner last night that a
few of you attended, which honored the last eight years of our
administration. And one of the people who performed was the comedian,
Red Buttons, who must be -- I don't know how old he is now, but he's not
a kid. (Laughter.) And he can say things the rest of us can't say.
And the first thing he got up and said, do you know that in Los Angeles,
the Democrats are changing their theme songs from "Happy Days Are Here
Again" to "Hava Nagila." (Laughter.) He also gave me a lot of other
jokes, but I don't think I should use any of them. (Laughter.)

Hillary and I have known Joe Lieberman -- she may have said this --
but we met him in 1970, when I was a first year law student, she was a
second year law student and he was a 28-year-old candidate for the state
senate. And I was especially impressed by the fact that he had been a
Freedom Rider in Mississippi, or somewhere in the south, and was down
there registering voters at a time when it wasn't easy to do and,
frankly, anybody who tried to do it was in some measure of physical
danger.

In all the years since, we've kept in touch. And about 15 years
ago we were among those who started the Democratic Leadership Council.
He's a brilliant man, a little bit of an iconoclast and always willing
to think new thoughts -- and I think we need more of that in politics.
The world is changing very rapidly and we need people who can think.
(Applause.)

And most important of all, he will be a living embodiment -- along
with Hadassah, who, as all of you know, is the child of Holocaust
survivors -- they will be a living embodiment of America's continuing
commitment to build one national community, to embrace people across all
the lines that divide us. It's still the most important thing we can
do. (Applause.)

I want to say just a few words, if I might, about the peace process
in the Middle East. You'll hear enough of the election rhetoric
elsewhere, and maybe a little from me tomorrow night. But I want to
talk about that for a moment.

In the last seven years we've seen the signing of the Declaration
of Principles on the South Lawn, which reflected the direct engagement
of the parties at Oslo; the Israeli-Palestinian interim agreement, a
treaty leading to genuine peace between Israel and Jordan; the rallying
of the world's leaders, including the leaders of the Arab world at Sharm
el-Sheik, to condemn terrorist attacks against Israel; the Hebron and
Wye accords, which put the implementation of the interim agreement back
on track.

In these years, both sides have recognized that whether they like
it sometimes or don't like it sometimes, the Israelis and Palestinians
are bound to live side by side. Throughout the process, however, the
ultimate question of how they would live side by side has been
continually deferred. I always thought that was part of the genius of
the Oslo accord.

Some people didn't like it; I thought it was a smart thing to do.
Everyone knew how hard these final status issues were, and everyone knew
there was absolutely no chance of resolving them unless the people --
particularly those in responsible positions -- lived together and worked
together over a period of years and gradually began to implement other
parts of the agreement so they could get a feel for each other.

However, they agreed that they would resolve all this by September
and we were coming up on the deadline. And they had never really had a
formal, face-to-face set of official conversations about these final
status issues. And I can understand why -- it's kind of like going to
the dentist without anybody to deaden your gums. (Laughter.) I mean,
if this were easy, somebody would have done it years ago.

But that is the context in which I brought them together at Camp
David. Not because I thought that there was a guarantee of success --
far from it -- but because they needed a setting in which they could
speak openly, think freely, protected from the competing pressures and
constant scrutiny that is a part of political life in Israel and
throughout the Middle East, perhaps even more than it is in the United
States.

Now, I don't want to sugarcoat it. I wanted an agreement; we
didn't get one. But I can tell you, significant progress was made at
Camp David. One of the Palestinian negotiators said that these were
truly revolutionary talks because on their side they entertained
publicly -- or, not publicly, but in front of others -- positions they
had never before considered. It's almost as if we cracked open a sealed
container and took out a set of problems that had been festering in a
dark place for 52 years. They're now out on the table, the parties are
talking about them, issues never before confronted in an official
setting.

How would a new Palestinian state be defined, what would its
borders be? What should be done about refugees from 1948, not just
Palestinian refugees but Jewish refugees, as well. And you might be
interested in knowing that the Palestinians felt that their families
should be entitled to compensation as well. How do you protect Israel's
security if it withdraws from the West Bank? What in the world do you
do about Jerusalem? It is a holy city, but it has caused a hellish lot
of problems. And we have to think it through in a very serious and
sober way.

The process is not over and, therefore, it is inappropriate for me
to discuss the specifics. I don't want to make a hard problem more
difficult. But I can say one or two things.

First of all, everybody affected by the peace process is faced with
a choice. We are now at a crossroads because of the calendar to which
the parties themselves have agreed. Down one path lies more
confrontation and conflict, more bloodshed and tears. Down the other is
an agreement, however difficult. By definition, agreements require
compromise, which means no one gets 100 percent and neither side can be
in a position to say that it has completely vanquished the other.

That means that, given the positions taken -- and I talked about
this at the end of the Camp David process -- this is an excruciatingly
difficult negotiation. The choices are painful and agonizing, but they
have to be made. Otherwise, we will repeat the pattern of the past and
then, sometime in the future, another group of leaders will come back to
the same set of choices with the same history after more bloodshed and
tears, more grievances to redress, more bitterness to overcome.

We may or may not be able to get an agreement, but we ought to keep
trying, and I will keep trying every single day. (Applause.)

I want to emphasize some things I have said for seven and a half
years now, and I haven't changed my mind. We can come up with ideas, we
can offer alternatives, but we must not -- indeed, we will not --
attempt to impose any of our ideas. These choices must be freely made
by people who must live with them.

In the meanwhile, we must continue to stand by Israel, as we have
during my entire tenure as President and for the last 52 years.
(Applause.) We will help Israel to maintain its strength, we will
minimize the courageous risks the Prime Minister is taking for peace, we
will improve our security relationship, we will do everything we
possibly can to make this work.

One of the things I think you should know that struck me most at
Camp David, and says something for the people who launched the Oslo
process seven years ago, is the difference in the way the negotiators
relate to each other even when they were fighting. When I brought the
parties together at Dayton after we and our NATO allies ended the
Bosnian war, they could barely stand to be in the same room together.
When I went to Kosovo to see our soldiers and to meet with all the
parties there, the wounds of ethnic cleansing and the battle we waged to
reverse it were so fresh and raw that people could hardly bear to come
into the same room and came only because I invited them and insisted
that they come.

When I went first to Northern Ireland and walked down the Shankel
and the Falls, the Catholic and the Protestant streets in Belfast, it
was difficult for the most controversial of the political leaders who
had to be involved in any resolution to even be seen talking to each
other, much less for anyone to know they had shaken hands.

The Israelis and Palestinians, after these years, know each other
by their first names; they know their spouses names; they know how many
children they have; they know how many grandchildren they have; they
tell jokes to each other, sometimes about their own leaders; they laugh
and they talk and they have a feel for the humanity and the difficulty
of the situation.

This is not to say that they are soft-headed. Indeed, I never saw
anyone more resolute about the fundamental security interests of the
State of Israel than the Prime Minister was in these negotiations. And
for whatever it's worth, the security questions were the ones on which
we made the most progress, which is something that should be encouraging
to all of you. I don't know what's going to happen.

But I know this: the most heartbreaking moments of the last eight
years for me and for Hillary, for Al and for our whole team, have been
those moments when people were blinded by acts of hatred against others
because they fit in some sort of category or another -- that poor
twisted boy that blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, his mind
and soul polluted by this anti-government venom that was out there at
the time; the school children who were killed by terrorist attack in
Israel; the man who belonged to a church that he said didn't believe in
God, but did believe in white supremacy, murdering an African American
basketball coach in Chicago and killing a Korean Christian as he walked
out of his church; people who shot the -- the man who shot the Jewish
children here going to their school and then killed a Filipino postal
worker and thought he had had a double success -- he killed an Asian and
a federal employee.

We see it within our country and beyond our borders. I have seen
people who were literally ethnically indistinguishable in the Balkans
killing each other because history made them Orthodox Christians or
Muslims or Catholics.

It is ironic that at a time when we celebrate the triumph of the
human genome and where the Internet is the fastest-growing
communications vehicle in human history -- and, by the way, Al Gore did
sponsor the legislation -- (laughter and applause) -- part of my job
since I'm not running, you know, is to correct the record here.
(Laughter.)

The Internet was, in the beginning, the private province of a few
physicists. Al Gore saw -- virtually before anybody else, certainly in
Congress -- that it could be transformed into a medium of communication
and could hold information that could benefit all of human kind, that
the whole Library of Congress would one day be on the Internet. That
was the metaphor he said well over a decade ago.

Now the whole Encyclopedia Britanica is on the Internet. Pretty
soon, my whole Presidential Library will be on the internet.
(Applause.) There were only 50 sites on the worldwide web when I became
President -- 5-0. Today there are -- I'm not sure how many -- but way,
way over 10 million, the fastest growing mechanism in human history.

But, anyway, so you've got all this stuff happening, all this
wonderful, modern stuff, and here we are bedeviled by the oldest
problems of human society -- the fear of the other, people that are
different from us.

That's why it's a good thing that Al Gore put Joe Lieberman on the
ticket and other Americans will see that he is a brilliant person, that
he is a good person, that he has a contribution to make. And I think
more and more people will respect the fact that he gives up his entire
Sabbath away from all work and politics on a day that coincidentally
happens to be the best politicking day in the American political system.
I think this will be a good thing for America. (Applause.)

And what I would ask you to do as we see the events of the coming
weeks unfold, is to never lose your passion for peace and for
reconciliation; to remember that America cannot do good works abroad
unless we are a good country first here at home -- (applause); that we
have to purge ourselves of all traces of bigotry and hatred; and that we
have to go forward together as one community; and that we have to do it
not just with our words and our pictures, but with our deeds.

It is one thing to say we want to build one America and another
thing to do it, whether it's passing hate crimes legislation, employment
nondiscrimination legislation, raising the minimum wage or doing the
other kinds of things that show that we really believe that we're all in
this together and we all do better when we help each other.

The overwhelming fact of modern life is not the growth of the
Internet, the growth of the global economy, the explosion of
biotechnology, but what they all mean in a larger sense. Which is that
every single day, in breathtaking ways, many of which we cannot see, we
are growing more interdependent. We need each other more. So we have
to find a way not just to tolerate one another, but to celebrate our
diversity and take comfort from the fact that what we have in common is
even more fundamental and more important. (Applause.) Yes, compassion
is important, but enlightened self-interest is even better. We need to
know we actually need each other and we need to do the right thing by
each other. (Applause.)

So for me it's a great comfort to know that the Vice President and
Joe Lieberman are running, that Hillary is running and that we're moving
in the right direction. I just want to ask you this: spend every day
you can between now and November reminding people that it matters and
that there are differences. And if you do that, we'll all win and
America will be fine.